There is a constant pressure on arts companies or individual artists to stay current with all the tools of communications. Nowadays, having a website is pretty much a necessity; no one would take anyone seriously who didn’t have one. To say “I don’t have a website” is like saying “I don’t have a telephone.”
At Porte Parole we’ve worked hard to try and maintain a strong and relevant online presence but it sometimes feels like a game of catch-up because we are first and foremost a theatre company and the plays must always be the priority. In my own work, am I going to spend an hour checking out the Twitter buzz versus finalizing the play program for a production that starts, say, tomorrow? The choice between the two is pretty obvious.
Some of the multimedia activities we now engage in at Porte Parole, such as making video trailers, have become fairly standard for theatre companies. As a tiny team, it takes a lot out of us to produce them — and without co-director (and now co-blogger) Laura, what we have accomplished with videos would have proved impossible! But we do see the utility of our efforts at the end of the day. Our videos end up sometimes embedded on other sites. Most recently, our videos for Sexy béton were used at this excellent site — Atuvu — which led directly to sales for the last part of the trilogy, Sexy béton III: Abandon.
Our efforts to reach audiences through different media, especially online, will likely only intensify over the coming months and years. You have to go to where the eyeballs are, as they say. While the Porte Parole experience can’t be replicated through video or film or photography, they certainly can render different aspects of that experience accessible and engaging to many people. Even the photography on our flickr page often strikes me as a strong hook into the Porte Parole world.
Over the next while, we will be working to take advantage of the strong materials we have already and working to integrate them better in a new site. It’s our plan to re-work the main website and also host this blog there so that everything is available in one place.
Meanwhile, if you have any ideas about how Porte Parole can improve its multimedia and online efforts, feel free to leave a comment below.
